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It is common knowledge that the acceptance and understanding of Linux in the USA is growing. It should be no surprise that the same qualities which make Linux so attractive to people and companies in the USA are winning over people in other countries as well. At this year’s Desktop Linux Summit, which ended on April 25th, a number of announcements were made which confirms this trend. One such announcement was the creation of Latinux, a group of companies and organizations whose stated goal is to increase the knowledge and use of free software in Latin America.

Latinux is actually a group organizations from from Brazil, Venezuela, Puerto Rico, and the United States. The new organization was formed based on talks they had at Boston’s 2006 Linux World Expo and Lacfree 2005 in Brazil. These talks culminated in the signing of an agreement at the 7th International Forum on Software Libre. The signatories were Alacos, Corvus Latinoamerica, ISEIT, Propus, Red Boriuca, and Solis.

While the formation of this group marks a very broad gesture, they were able set forth clear goals. These objectives are based around developing “software libre” (free software), as well as increasing the knowledge and availability of this software. These objectives are planned to be implemented both on the local and regional scales, with the focus on Latin American member countries. It was also stated that products which are tested and found successful on the local level will be implemented on a larger scale, possibly to the entire Latin American region, as the need arises.

The project is clearly just getting started and not much information has been made available about it or the intended course of action. The computing needs in the Latin American region is growing quite rapidly and free, open source software is certainly a tool which will help the region make rapid strides without the limitations of commercial software or its prohibitive pricing.

One project which is said to be in its alpha stage is “Cuaima”. This is described as a meta installer, or an installation application which is able to install any type of distribution, such as Gentoo, Debian, Feather Linux, Fedora, or even other versions of *NIX.